Posts Tagged ‘Norton Juster’

In 1963, two years after he penned his timeless classic The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster wrote and illustrated The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (public library) — the quirky and infinitely wonderful love story that unfolds in a one-dimensional universe called Lineland where women are dots and men are lines; a hopeful straight line falls hopelessly in love with a dot out of his league, who only has eyes for a sleazy squiggle, and sets about wooing her. Inspired by the Victorian novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, it’s an endearing and witty fable of persistence and passion, and a creative masterwork at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and graphic design.

To woo the dot, the line decides to master the myriad shapes capable of expressing his full potential.

For months he practiced in secret. Soon he was making squares and triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, rhomboids, polyhedrons, trapezoids, parallelepipeds, decagons, tetragrams and an infinite number of other shapes so complex that he had to letter his sides and angles to keep his place.

Before long he had learned to carefully control ellipses, circles and complex curves and to express himself in any shape he wished — “You name it, I’ll play it.”

So he takes the dot out one evening and metamorphoses into a dizzying array of shapes to charm her with his refined versatility.

Juster brings the story to a modern fairy-tale ending, where the dot and the line live “if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so,” and ends with a charming pun for the mathematically tickled:

MORAL: The vector belongs to the spoils.

Juster’s jacket-copy bio is fittingly delightful:

Norton Juster is a dedicated mathematician whose efforts have been focused primarily on the verification of supermarket register receipts and the calculation of restaurant gratuities in a number of foreign currencies. He has also done pioneering work on the psychological effects of mathematical melancholia.

In 1965, the book was adapted into an equally charming, Oscar-winning short film by Chuck Jones, featured here previously and shared again below for our repeated pleasure:

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

“Failure is a process… You have to fail over and over and over again to get anything that’s worthwhile.”

In 1961, a young architect by the name of Norton Juster received a grant for a book on urban perception and settled down at his house in Brooklyn Heights to write it. Struggling with the process, however, he began toying with a playful story about a boy named Milo in an effort to distract himself from the burden of his workload, and showed his drafts to his neighbor, an emerging political cartoonist named Jules Feiffer. Juster never wrote the urbanism book — instead, he teamed up with Feiffer and together they dreamt up The Phantom Tollbooth, which went on to become one of the most celebrated children’s books of all time, brimming with timeless philosophy for grown-ups — its map of The Kingdom of Wisdom alone is a profound metaphor for curiosity and the human condition.

Map of The Kingdom of Wisdom from ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

In 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of the beloved classic, Brooklyn-based filmmaker Hannah Jayanti set out to capture the book’s remarkable legacy by offering a rare glimpse of its creative process in a documentary that follows Feiffer and Juster, both 82 at the time, as they reminisce about their historic collaboration and the lesser-known challenges of the project. The documentary, funded on Kickstarter, has now come to life. Hannah has kindly offered two exclusive clips from The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations — one of Juster and one of Feiffer, each reflecting on the core of his creative philosophy — for our collective enjoyment. In the first clip, Juster explores the reverse bell curve of pleasure that stretches across what he considers to be the three stages of writing — a notion that maps almost perfectly onto Malcolm Cowley’s four-step model, only fusing the first two steps into one — as he looks back on writing The Phantom Tollbooth:

It was a wonderful experience — wonderful in an odd sense, in that I always felt there were three steps in writing:

The first step, which is the anticipation of writing — wonderful, because there you are with an abstract idea, and you’re quite sure that you can do it, and it’s going to be quite wonderful, and you can visualize all the wonderful sales, the interviews, the reviews; you start to write your Nobel acceptance speech. And so that’s great, because there’s nothing real there, in the anticipation of writing.

Number three is the other end of that, having finished — and that’s a wonderful feeling, because number two is an agony all the way.

I find that writing … it’s so anxiety-making, it’s so tense, it’s so scary, it’s so full of danger of failure, that you wake up every morning and you’re not sure what’s going to happen, and you don’t know whether you’re going to be able to do it… You can feel what you want in the back of your head but can you and are you going to get it down on paper so someone else can feel the same.

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

newsletter

donating = loving

Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps supportBrain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.